Getting Elected in the Age of Protest

Umansky and Sened marry Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy logic to William Riker's heresthetics to show how outsider parties manufacture new dimensions of political conflict to shift the terrain on which elections are contested. The book locates the FPÖ, UKIP, AfD, and Italy's populist surge on a common analytical map, explaining how populists reshape the political spaces mainstream parties thought they controlled. -- John M. Carey, Dartmouth College, USA
A theoretically sophisticated and empirically compelling account of the rise and influence of populist parties in Europe. By applying rigorous spatial models to one of the most pressing questions in contemporary European politics, this book offers important new insights into the electoral and strategic dynamics underlying the growing influence of populist parties. Its careful integration of theory and empirical analysis significantly advances our understanding of contemporary party competition. This book deserves a wide readership among students and scholars not only of European politics, but also of comparative politics, political parties, and electoral behavior. -- Gyung-Ho Jeong, University of British Columbia, Canada
While Riker's heresthetics revolutionized our understanding of party competition by showing how new dimensions endogenously evolve through party strategy, he left unaddressed how such dimensions get formed out of nothing. Umansky and Sened’s "legitimate enemy" strategy offers a novel account of how populist challengers manufacture the issue dimensions they then dominate. -- Elias Dinas, European University Institute, Italy
The book, Getting Elected in the Age of Protest, takes an innovative approach to analyzing one of the most important developments in modern democratic politics: the rise of populism. In contrast to the most common theories that emphasize such issues as the losers of globalization or the neo-liberal turn of social democratic parties, this book offers a novel approach that combines several aspects, especially issue salience with the ability to introduce a “legitimate enemy” as well as the tendency toward multidimensional political competition. They point out that in politics, supply does not always meet demand. When the mainstream parties ignore issues that are important for voters, it opens the opportunity for populist parties to take up these issues and assign blame to an enemy. In recent years the main enemies that have gained resonance have been disdain for the EU and fear of immigration. This book gives four examples of these dynamics by comparing populist movements in the UK, Germany, Austria and Italy. This comparative perspective shows how populist dynamics while similar, must be contextualized and are not structurally predetermined. This book develops a novel theory that will become basic reading for anyone interested in understanding the “the populist zeitgeist.” -- Steven Saxonberg, Södertörns högskola, Sweden